Monday, October 15, 2012

Street Art: The Power of Location

Perspective in art can be defined by creating a viewpoint
for your audience that will best communicate your subject and serve a
particular message. The goal of perspective in street art is many times communicated
and acted on by choice of location.
The canvas of a street artist is the world and is not confined by what
can museum appropriate and the lines of a canvas. It can be placed anywhere and
the choice of the location has as much impact to the viewer as the content
itself. Location is used as a tool
to further communicate the message the street artist is making to the viewer.
If you have the same content in two different locations,
the meaning behind could be completely different at each location. One location
would have a different perspective than the other even if it were the same
imagery of street art.

Carlo McCormick, author of Trespass: A history of Uncommissioned Urban Art, discusses the
conquest of space in street art. McCormick states, “Location is everything;
context and content are ultimately the most measurable difference between what
is written in the bathroom stall and the profound bravado of more heroic feats
like Smith and Sanes landmark subjugation of the Brooklyn Bridge, a move so
ball-out as the single greatest escalation within the graffiti wars.” [1] The
marking of Smith and Sanes in 1988 on the Brooklyn Bridge was an impactful
statement strictly based on marking the territory of an icon. If the street
artists wrote their name on the side of a motor vehicle it would not have made
such a large impact to the viewers.

Filippo Minelli is a street artist that is famous for his
work that pointed out the growing disconnect with reality that comes from
living a 2.0 lifestyle. Minelli wrote names of the companies that connect us to
living a 2.0 lifestyle in locations that give a clear portrayal of the slums of
third world. In Bamako, Mali 2008, he wrote FACEBOOK on the side of a landfill
and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2007 he wrote FLICKR and MYSPACE on the side of
slum buildings.Minelli notes, “Writing
the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of
the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in
and the ephemeral world of technologies.” [2] The choice of location brings new
context to the names creating a contrasting perspective between or digital life
and the realities that exist in third world countries.

Banksy is one of the most well-known and controversial
street artist of our time and has work placed across the globe. In 2006, Banksy
took a trip to Disneyland in Anaheim, California to place a life-size sculpture
of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner inside the Rocky Mountain Railroad ride. A
spokeswoman for Banksy said the stunt was intended to highlight the plight
terror suspects at the controversial detention centre in cuba.” [3] In the
award-winning documentary, Exit Through
the Gift Shop, Banksy states while looking at a map of the amusement park,
“There’s this site with a picture of a camera on it saying this would be a
great place to take a souvenir photo. So, that obviously seemed like the best
place to put him.” [4] Other than picking a location in the park that is high
in traffic and a place that is common for souvenir photos to have his work
showcased in the background of the photos taken, there is a strategic purpose
in choosing Disneyland as the location for the work. Disneyland is a fantasy
world where visitors become submerged into fairytales and escape the harsh
realities faced in everyday life. By placing the Guantanamo Bay prisoner into
the fairytale world, Banksy creates a thick contrast between the realities of
war that are commonly ignored with the fairytale life we choose to live.

David Ley and Roman Cybriwsky wrote in the Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, “The quality and location of graffiti
display regularities. They manifest the distribution of various social
attitudes and intimate subsequent behavior in space; as such, certain types of
graffiti forecast both potential and actual behavior.” [5] The article
discusses how the context of street art is not just dependent on the imagery
alone. Who did the work and the location of the work are just as important
variables. If teenage gangs performed street art for territorial markers, the
imagery may indicate a name or contested space. However, if street art were
performed in an ethnic neighborhood it would have a higher probability of being
related to social change.Street
artists place tremendous value on the location of their work to further
emphasize their message behind the perspective. [5]

In 2007, Laura Keeble, a London based artist, created a
piece titled Idol Worship at cemetery
in South End, Essex, England. She created a series of tombstones out of
polystyrene, plaster and spray paint for global brands, such as McDonalds,
Chanel, and Nike.The purpose of
the work was to look at belief systems and idol worship of corporations. By
marrying death with the corporate identities of popular brands creates a pause
for thought in the viewers’ perception of corporate dependency. The location of
the street art plays a large role in the perspective and message behind the
work. By placing the tombstones of corporate identities in an area where prayer
is commonly practiced, the context of the work and the message to the viewer
changes. Keeble was aware of the locations’ common practice of prayer and used
the location as a tool to convey her message to the public. [6]

In The Work on the Street: Street
Art and Visual Culture, Martin Irvine wrote, “The social meaning of street art is a function of material locations
with all their already structured symbolic values. The city location is an
inseparable substrate for the work, and street art is explicitly an engagement
with a city, often a specific neighborhood. Street artists are adept masters of
the semiotics of space, and engage with the city itself as a collage or
assemblage of visual environments and source material. A specific site, street,
wall, or building in London, New York, Paris, or Washington, DC is already
encoded as a symbolic place, the dialogic context for the placement of the
piece by the artist.” [7] Street artists convey some sort of
message in their work and create a process of thought to the viewer. Whether it
is a territorial mark, a reflection of social change, or a political statement,
there is a message behind the work and the location of the work plays a large
role in communicating the message.